TigerHawk

TigerHawk (ti*ger*hawk): n. 1. The title of this blog and the nom de plume of its founding blogger; 2. A deep bow to the Princeton Tigers and the Iowa Hawkeyes; 3. The nickname for Iowa's Hawkeye logo. Posts include thoughts of the day on international affairs, politics, things that strike us as hilarious and personal observations. The opinions we express are our own, and not those of each other, our employers, our relatives, our dead ancestors, or unrelated people of similar ethnicity.

Wednesday, December 08, 2010

"Peak oil" becomes "oil peak"

This is good news, unless you are against large supplies of domestic energy:

The American Petroleum Institute reports that the United States produced more crude oil in October than it has ever produced in a single month, “peak oil” or not.

This reversal of trend helps explain why U.S. domestic production for the year will be 140,000 barrels a day higher than last year (which was 410,000 barrels a day higher than 2008).

Our petroleum engineers continue to be smarter and harder working than our "limits to growth" enemies of progress. That has been true my entire sentient life, and I expect it to continue to be true more or less until the end of time. Or at least my time.

UPDATE: Rats! A commenter points out that the online edition of the linked story has now been corrected to take out the fun part:

Correction: U.S. domestic crude oil production reached 5.5 million barrels a day in October, half the production of the U.S. “peak oil” high in 1970. Incorrect information was published in this online and in the print versions of this column.

4 Comments:

To think what those really smart guys would be able to do if we took the constraints off of them? At what point does a liberal/irreconciliable environmentalist ask themself if it is better that we get our oil from Saudi Arabia, Nigeria or Venezuela and how good of a steward of mother earth will they be versus an American oil man? I suppose it is their belief that we need to work harder to find solutions so that we dont need anybody's oil...? The truly unfortunate element of this is that this fantasy land that these people live in is costing us jobs, forcing our American policy to stand beholden to many of the tirants who run these countries and worse yet they leave their beloved mother earth more exposed to calamity from the poorly trained and/or the "hardly caring". A triple loss tied into one unbelievably reflexive belief...

This may have been one of those TGTV stories - Too Good To Verify. Unfortunately, this is the addendum at the bottom of the article:

Correction: U.S. domestic crude oil production reached 5.5 million barrels a day in October, half the production of the U.S. “peak oil” high in 1970. Incorrect information was published in this online and in the print versions of this column.

Peak oil calculations are pretty much a function of oil reserves and oil reserve quantities are pretty much a function of the price of oil. It has been that way as long as I can remember, say 30 years.